The Workshop of Physical Agents intends to be a forum for information and experience exchange in different areas regarding the concept of agent on physical environments, especially applied to the control and coordination of autonomous systems: robots, mobile robots, industrial…

This paper presents a brief summary of the post-proceedings of the special session on practical applications held in the framework of IWANN 2009. The special session was supported by the THOMAS (TIN2006-14630-C03-03) project and aims at presenting the results obtained…

This paper introduces the development of an infrastructure to study highly complex systems of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) which involve a large number of users. The key ideas about the development of a multi-agent based simulation (MABS) for such purposes, Ubik,…

In the convergence theory of multisplittings for symmetric positive definite (s.p.d.) matrices it is usually assumed that the weighting matrices are scalar matrices, i.e., multiples of the identity. In this paper, this restrictive condition is eliminated. In its place it…

The purpose of this study was to examine how children think about and attribute features of friendship to a robot after a brief interaction with one. Children visiting a science centre located in a major Western Canadian city were randomly…

In the last decade competitions proved to be a very efficient way of encouraging researchers to advance the state of the art in different research fields in artificial intelligence. In this paper we focus on the optional task of the…

The ability of building robust semantic space representations of environments is crucial for the development of truly autonomous robots. This task, inherently connected with cognition, is traditionally achieved by training the robot with a supervised learning phase. We argue that…

This special issue of the Journal of Physical Agents is devoted to multi-robot systems. Some might perhaps argue that the term should have been ”multi-agent systems” or ”physical multi-agent systems”, in accordance with the title of the journal. In any…

This paper briefly introduces a summary of the special session on Hybrid Reasoning and Coordination Methods on Multi-Agent Systems, held in conjunction with the 4th International Conference on Hybrid Artificial Intelligence Systems 2009 (HAIS’09). The research papers of this session…

This special issue of the Journal of Physical Agents is devoted to human interaction with domestic robots. The form, features and future, of domestic robotic devices, from entertainment-based agents through to robotic cleaners, companions, assistants and helpers, are considered and…